An honest, passionate account of a refugee family’s terrible losses that should inspire, as the author hopes, others to...
A Syrian refugee family's attempt to cross the sea results in tragedy.
Millions of people have seen the heartbreaking photograph of Alan Kurdi: a young boy lying in the sand, dead at the edge of the sea. Appallingly, Alan is just one of thousands of Syrians who have died in a desperate effort to flee their shattered, war-torn country. In this gripping, emotionally charged account, Tima Kurdi, Alan’s British Columbia–based activist aunt, shares her family's story and the events that led to this horrific moment, in which everything changed not only personally, but also globally, as the world finally became aware of the plight of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Although readers know the outcome of the story from the beginning, the suspense and anxiety are all that much greater as the author details the beautiful family life she shared with her siblings in Syria, filled with laughter, good food, and a strong sense of culture and pride. The war began after Kurdi had married and moved to Canada, and the family's peaceful existence quickly became a nightmare for her brothers and sisters who remained behind, as they suffered humiliation, deprivations, and even torture. Desperate for food, work, and shelter, her extended family broke apart, some traveling over land to safer countries and others choosing to risk crossing the Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece on flimsy rubber rafts filled past maximum capacity by the smugglers they hired. The ending of the author’s tale is shocking. Three members of her extended family died trying to reach a better life. Though they lost their lives, their names—Alan, Ghalib, and Rehanna—live on in this tribute to them and to all the Syrians who have lost loved ones and their homes due to the civil war that still plagues their homeland.
An honest, passionate account of a refugee family’s terrible losses that should inspire, as the author hopes, others to speak “for all the people who have no voice.”Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982108-51-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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